» Thu Jan 06, 2011 10:28 am
Look, games can't be optimised for one piece of hardware over another. Things can't just "scale" better depending on the logo, as its just a processor chewing its 1s and 0s.
"Maxing out a CPU in every possible way" makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. If processors were as split as you believe them to be, you'd need to download special "Intel supported Microsoft Word" or an "AMD enabled Windows 7".
It's all marketing. They may say 'it performs the best with us!', but it's corporate BS. NVIDIA know that Crysis 2 will look good, sell well, and be seen by many, so they pay EA/Crytek to stick their logos on the box. They may even pay them to add better DX11 support, but that isn't NVIDIA exclusive, everyone benefits from it. In fact, that may arguable benefit AMD more, as they were the first to release the DX11 cards.
NVIDIA are renowned for paying developers to disable features in games when AMD cards are detected. Take Arkham Asylum, for instance, if an AMD card is detected then anti-aliasing options disappear off the menu. Download a patch, or change your videocard's ID number to disguise it as NVIDIA and AA is on the menu, and functioning completely perfectly.
Intel CPUs benefit from hyper-threading, so they have a larger number of simultaneous threads. They may pay developers to take advantage of it, but that's progress, and someone with an AMD quad-core won't feel anything compared to an Intel dual-core with hyper-threading enabled. Even then, games barely chew through a CPU at all, it's all in the GPU.
NVIDIA also cheat on the newer 3DMark benchmarks, by having the PhysX support, which contributes a huge amount to the overall score. In actuality PhysX is nearly meaningless and is a patch away for the games which support it. Even then, underused CPUs can do the processing, especially since most are multi-cored.
There are thousands of CPUs and GPUs on the market, and it's impossible to cater for one particular card, or a family, especially when they're constantly developing through drivers and new hardware. Everything changes so fast, so that if a game is "optimised" for any one product, one month later when new drivers come out everything changes.